Embedded Technology
minority of designs are done by customers in-house due to rising complexity. Creating a platform – hardware and software – based on a high-end processor would cost well into six figures. So, unless your volumes are consumer or specialist consumer – which I generally think of as millions or hundreds of thousands – it wouldn't make commercial sense to do your own in-house design.
To undertake these complex designs, you could go to a systems integrator, but it's only passing on the problem because they've still got to work from the ground up. Or you can use ready-made platforms – and that's where we come in. With our customers, we’ve been involved in hundreds of designs in a decade, which is much more than a traditional systems integrator would do in that timescale even if they’re much bigger than us. We do so many projects because our input can be anything from doing the entire project for the customer, but using ready-made platforms to make it easier, right through to supporting the customer to do it themselves based on a system-on-module.
CIE: Are there any challenges associated with using ready-made platforms? David: Using a ready-made platform such as a SoM saves you a lot of work. But at the same time, it comes with an inbuilt disadvantage. It’s like me saying to you: “Here’s a half-baked cake – you finish it.” You might say: “I’m very happy, you’ve done half of the cake baking… but I don’t know what ingredients you put in it or what the cooking time is going to be, so you’re actually handing me a problem here.”
The important thing with these ready-made platforms – whether they're software in the form of middleware, and operating systems, or they’re hardware (we're best known for system-on-module- based platforms) – is to recognise that just because they are application-ready, 80 per cent finished platforms doesn't mean they're easy to adopt unless comprehensive support, documentation and a little training is available.
With our approach and long-standing partnerships, and our experience and expertise which encompass the entire product lifecycle, we facilitate and make it easy for customers to adopt this platform- based approach. To use a platform product, it can then be quite easy to transition to new hardware.
www.cieonline.co.uk
CIE: Can you provide examples of projects you’ve been involved with? David: Some of the solutions we’ve worked on have been for smart motorways and buses, monitoring systems for railways and airports, soldier tracker devices for the
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can use the different systems or modules in their system according to their performance needs. I think our customers benefit from the scalability using the modules that we have and from our expertise to sell all sorts of systems including customised systems.
Medical, transportation and industrial are big areas for us but with support for NXP’s S32G processor family, MicroSys shares our growing focus on automotive and medical, and on safety-certified development, including ISO 26262, IEC 62304 and IEC 61508.
The most obvious excitement in our industry at the moment is AI. Because you’ve got this whole concept going on that data is valuable. And there’s a lot of data that you can acquire. But how can you realise the value of it with AI?
British Army, as well as technology used in autonomous submarines and wind turbines.
CIE: Ina, please could you provide some background into MicroSys? Ina Schindler: MicroSys was founded in 1975 and we are a privately owned company based in Germany that designs and develops embedded system solutions. We only use NXP to power architecture, integrating NXP’s S32 Automotive, Layerscape and QorIQ processor technology. Our strengths are designs based on system-on-modules (SoMs), with our portfolio ranging from application-ready SoMs and customer-specific carrier board designs to fully integrated systems.
The application areas for our rugged designs (with long-term availability) are primarily found in markets where safety standards analogue to IEC 61508 are required, such as railway technology, aviation, and mobile machinery, as well as manufacturing robots, control systems, and drive systems. Further application areas can be found in medical technology, and in critical infrastructures, like the nuclear sector or the process industry.
As a small company, our relationships with our partners and customers are very important to us. Our aim is to talk to customers over a longer period and to guide them over the whole lifecycle of the project, not just one system. NXP has this longevity program for the Layerscape processors to 2035, for example. In this very close relationship, our customers also have direct contact to our engineers where they can figure out together what processor will suit them best, and they
Finally, we have a very close relationship with NXP. They're sitting very close to us in Munich, so there's daily exchanges between our engineers. Also, you don't have to use the resources inside of NXP, you can just use us. And our experience. This saves a lot of time and money.
CIE: Ina, how does Direct Insight fit into the picture? Ina: As I’ve mentioned, it is very important for us to have a close relationship with our customers and to have Direct Insight in the UK – where we haven’t had much of a presence before – getting in touch with the UK customers and selling the NXP S32G and Layerscape-based products.
We also have a partnership with Hailo to introduce high-performance embedded artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. This opens the door to other projects as well in the AI world such as medical and construction. So, in partnering with Direct Insight, we have a really nice synergy based on our experience with NXP, and we can add the experience with Hailo.
CIE: David, could you explain how MicroSys fits into Direct Insight’s long-term plans? David: NXP is the most generally embedded- friendly of all the system-on-chip vendors we use. As MicroSys is also NXP-focused in its products but on different processor families from our traditional emphasis, that enables us to extend out of what you would term ‘general embedded’ into some more focused and exciting areas – exciting because that’s the way the market is developing.
This is also a natural direction for us because some of the biggest insfrastructure and data management challenges are in automotive in the software-defined vehicle area. If you think of a car with all the sensors on it, the amount of data, even per second, is absolutely huge. That immediately leads you to high- performance processing, high-performance networking, and software tools, including AI and database tools to enable you to wrangle that huge amount of data and do something with it before you have many terabytes of data that you don't even have the bandwidth to upload.
CIE: Are there any developments in embedded tech that really excite you? David: The most obvious excitement in our industry at the moment is AI. Because you’ve got this whole concept going on that data is valuable. And there’s a lot of data that you can acquire. But how can you realise the value of it with AI? It's exciting, because it means change and change means opportunity. Especially when you're a smaller company, you can quickly adapt to these opportunities as you've seen MicroSys doing by adding AI facilities to it products.
What then happens is that people are extremely interested in these things. Do they immediately adopt them? No. It's actually surprising: the embedded world can be a bit conservative compared with the consumer world but being conservative is quite a valuable thing in our market. So, I'm excited by AI but I'm conscious that in our world it will be a steady journey, rather than a sudden plunge. Ina: As David mentioned, we always have the new technologies in mind, and we can see that in the consumer market there is always a rush to get the next one and the next one. In the embedded market, we are a little bit slower, but it means that we can take our time to gain experience, to develop the projects with the customer, and to increase security and safety matters too, which will create so many opportunities going forward.
www.directinsight.co.uk www.microsys.de
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